CISA publishes election infrastructure security plan ahead of 2026 midterms

CISA has published an Election Infrastructure Security Plan ahead of the November 2026 midterm elections, setting out guidance for state, local and federal bodies on mitigating cyber and physical threats to electoral systems. The plan, published on 24 September, covers physical assets such as polling places and vote tabulation sites as well as voter registration databases, voting machines and results reporting systems.

The agency warned that election infrastructure is often reachable from general enterprise networks, allowing attackers to exploit known vulnerabilities and move laterally, and said state, local, tribal and territorial election offices frequently struggle with basic cyber hygiene and patching. It urged harmonised patch management and certification requirements so that security updates can be applied without affecting system certification, and backed the use of paper ballots that can be reviewed to verify results.

CISA said threat actors have attempted to breach Statewide Voter Registration Databases in all 50 states, with confirmed success in at least 20 over the past decade, and recommended multifactor authentication, phishing-resistant methods for privileged accounts, continuous network monitoring and comprehensive audit logging. It also flagged insider risk from the large temporary election workforce, including poll workers, contractors and vendors, and pointed to bipartisan ballot handling, observer access and chain-of-custody procedures as mitigations.

The plan follows criticism of cuts to CISA’s election security work in 2025, including the termination of federally funded support for the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which is not mentioned in the new document. In September 2026 Senator Alex Padilla and Representative Joe Morelle wrote to the Trump administration demanding that funding for the EI-ISAC be restored before the midterms.